Alistair Ian Blyth - Card Catalogue

 

Alistair Ian Blyth, Card Catalogue, Dalkey Archive Press, 2020 

ISBN-13: 978-1628972696

 

In the crepuscular Bucharest of the decade after the Revolution, the neurasthenic, amnesic narrator of Card Catalogue meets Obmanschi, a former political prisoner and unpublished writer of the pre-war avant-garde. Over many years, Obmanschi has compiled a minutely detailed card catalogue of the realia to be found in the classic Russian novel, whose categories include not only everyday material items, but also books as tangible objects and even the cockroaches whose rustling presence can be heard in Gogol, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov. Meanwhile, the narrator compiles his own catalogue of oneiric books and their insubstantial authors, one of whom, bewilderingly, may be Obmanschi himself. Obmanschi already leads a second, shade-like existence, having been reduced to an independent, fictional character in the informer’s reports submitted to the secret police over the decades by the superintendent of his building. In a series of dreamlike narratives linked by the subject of libraries—book hoarding, book hunting, dreams of infinite other books, past and future—Card Catalogue hints that fiction is ultimately an oneiric world unto itself, in which the characters lead their own tenuous, separate existence, like the shades in Hades.